Change is good.
It might be uncomfortable, especially if you like the status quo, but it’s good. Without change, we’d still be traveling on horseback, wearing crinolines and communicating via letters. No change, no out-of-season vegetables or sushi restaurants. We’d live without TV and Internet, and die of diseases that are now curable.
Change is good but sometimes, you have to know where you came from to appreciate where you are. In the new book My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man’s Odysseyby Charles Rowan Beye, you’ll see why.
Growing up in Iowa City, Iowa, in pre-World War II years, Charles Rowan Beye was taught to maintain a genteel deportment.
His widowed mother insisted that all six of her offspring dress for dinner, and conversation was never provocative. Servants were to be ignored and children weren’t allowed in certain parts of their house.
Despite that his family was well-off, Beye went to public school and remembers feeling different than his peers, in part because of his mannerisms and demeanor. Still, other boys readily accepted him.
It was with one of them that Beye had his first sexual experience.
Though he’d kissed girls and paired up like other adolescents his age, Beye was definitely more attracted to boys than he was to girls. He dated girls and they loved him for his gentlemanly ways. Young men liked him because he was willing to do anything they wanted, on the spot, no questions asked.
But then, in the middle of going to college and becoming a teacher, Beye fell in love – with a woman.
He met her nine days after his 21st birthday and they were married four months later. She knew he was attracted to men and she accepted it until her death four years after their wedding. Not quite a year later, Beye married another woman, and then became a father four times over while continuing to sleep with men. His wife also had flings of her own, until she divorced Beye in about 1976.
“… I always say to myself, I just can’t do gay,” says Beye. But he finally did – and in 2008, he married the man he hopes to spend the rest of his life with.
As a look back at small-town gay America, pre-World War II and pre-AIDS, My Husband and My Wives is a delightful (albeit sometimes wordy) surprise.
With droll wit and the teensiest bit of self-depreciation, author Charles Rowan Beye writes about a time when homosexuality was a subject left on the highest shelf of the deepest closet. Still, despite any former furtiveness, Beye is unrestrained and unafraid to tell tales; in fact, he admits that his graphic remembrances could make readers uncomfortable.
He’s not far off in that warning and yet – this book is such a perfect look into gay life gone by, that you almost can’t help but enjoy it. For anyone who craves that step back in time, if just for a peek, My Husband and My Wives is something different for a change.
My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man’s Odyssey by Charles Rowan Beye
© 2012, FSG
$26/$28.95 Canada
257 pages
